‘It’s nice to play to people who don’t just know the song,” Cat Burns says, drinking in faces that, until now, have been confined to pixels. Anointed by the algorithmic gods of TikTok, the young Londoner was plucked from obscurity with Go, a pared-back pop ballad about an irredeemable relationship. Released in July 2020, it has been the slowest of slow burns, now installed at No 3 in the charts. Once, her music was grasping at wandering ears as she busked along London’s South Bank; now, her songs are sought out by millions.
Burns built her audience from the comfort of her bedroom, and in return, she has been invited into theirs. This show, her first of two, is sold out, but the audience feels less like a crowd and more like a gathering of friends and well-wishers.
She might have found her audience online, but on stage, Cat Burns is a natural performer, and her set is full-bodied, versatile and hungrily received. On record, her music is so stripped-back that it risks sounding bland when performed live, but she manages to create a spectacle from her songs’ simplicity. Her all-female band are dressed in white shirts and braces, mirroring her own rudeboy style; tonight, she wears a vibrant two-piece suit and a flat cap. Her songs are titled by way of self-diagnosis: Anxiety, People Pleaser, Low Self-Esteem. Her lyrics are uncomplicated, her themes are universal, and her humour is unquestionably Gen Z. “I think this sums up our generation quite well,” she smirks, surely ironically, as she introduces the title track for her latest EP, Emotionally Unavailable.
It’s typical of the way she cracks jokes about trauma before unloading it in her music, in the same way her audience repackages their own in a stroke of wit and 280 characters. The extent to which this resonates with the crowd is clear from the number of phones in the air, raised in salute along with a ripple of pride flags. Issues that once would alienate – queerness, introversion, fear and insecurity – are welcomed here. Emotionally unavailable? Absolutely not. But a people pleaser? Certainly.
